It's been more than two years since the general release of MySQL 5.6, and on Monday Oracle announced that its successor will soon arrive bearing a significant boost in performance along with improved security and scalability.

MySQL 5.7 promises speeds as much as three times faster than those of version 5.6. Specifically, in benchmark tests using SysBench Read-only Point-Selects and with 1,024 connections, MySQL 5.7 delivered 1.6 million queries per second, Oracle said.

"This is very competitive against other databases," said Tomas Ulin, Oracle's vice president of MySQL engineering. "These kinds of improvements come from removing internal bottlenecks in the software."

The InnoDB storage engine has also been optimized in this new release, bringing capabilities including increased performance and concurrency, enhanced online operations, spatial indexes and native partitioning, Oracle said.

Complex queries put an increased emphasis on joins and multijoins, and "then the optimizer becomes very important," Ulin said. "With 5.7 we've rewritten a lot of that code, much of which dated back to the early 2000s."

Other changes in MySQL 5.7 include improved security and scalability as well as new JSON capabilities that allow for the efficient and flexible storage, search and manipulation of schema-less data.

Along with Linux, Apache and PHP/Python/Perl, MySQL is one part of the so-called LAMP Stack used for Web development.

The new release builds upon Development Milestone Releases that have emerged over the past two years, enabling users to preview, test and provide feedback during the development process, Ulin noted.

Earlier this year, Amazon unveiled a competitor to MySQL known as Aurora.

Also on Monday Oracle announced the general availability of the new MySQL Router, which simplifies application development by intelligently routing queries to MySQL databases for increased performance and uptime.

Katherine Noyes has been an ardent geek ever since she first conquered Pyramid of Doom on an ancient TRS-80. Today she covers enterprise software in all its forms, with an emphasis on cloud computing, big data, analytics and artificial intelligence.